1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure is related to the field of interactive video games, specifically to user-based creating or generating of a playable interactive video game.
2. Description of the Related Art
The video game boom of the 1980s spawned a generation of fans who dreamed of designing their own video games. However, early video game platforms, including the Nintendo® Entertainment System, were primarily developed in eight-bit processor assembly languages, which were generally considered difficult to work with, even for experienced programmers. For young fans, learning to develop an actual game was effectively impossible, and aspiring young game designers instead drew their designs on paper, but have never been able to translate those designs directly into a playable video game.
Current game editors do not fill this void. Although some video game products include level editors, they only allow for software-based editing and do not interpret hand-drawn art. For example, in a typical game level editor, a graphical user interface (“GUI”) allows the user to select a terrain brush, draw terrain using that brush, and place other game elements onto the terrain, but this is all done on a literal basis. That is, the elements manipulated by the player in the GUI are game literals, having a one-to-one correspondence to the resulting game element in the game level data. However, there is no way for the user to draw the level outside of a level editor.